Mind matters

Ballett Frankfurt's Eidos:Telos

by Marcia B. Siegel

It would take as long to read and digest all the supplementary material provided by Ballett Frankfurt for its production of William Forsythe's Eidos:Telos (last week at the Brooklyn Opera House) as the ballet itself lasted. Forsythe wants to be known as an intellectual, a ballet insider, and an avant-gardist. This combination always whacks a certain segment of the public into submission, but it sends my skepticism into high gear. If you have to read a ballet's rationale to "get it," something's wrong. And if what you "get" doesn't actually mesh with the reading assignment, things are even more amiss.

I didn't read all of the philosophical-psychological-mythic argument for Eidos:Telos. I got bogged down in the first paragraph: "Eidos -- [Greek eidos: something; form; akin to]: The formal content of a culture, encompassing its system of ideas, criteria for interpreting experience, etc. Form, Plato's term, the permanent reality that makes a thing what it is, in contrast to the particulars that are finite and subject to change." The program and press kit went on like this for pages.

After the performance, before I slept, I went through the ballet several times and figured out some way its theatrically doctored chaos could have made a larger point, but I'm sure this interpretation won't resemble Forsythe's apologia.

Eidos:Telos is a big work, and not just because of its intellectual pretensions and its full-length duration. The stage is opened up to the bare walls and ceiling grids, miked for gargantuan effects, and goosed to higher levels of shock by coups de théâtre like the entrance, late in the first part, of three trombone players in black blaring atonally at megadecibels. This dadaistic universe is densely populated a great deal of the time with dancers in independent, uncoordinated action. It begins to seem like a speeded-up earthquake scene filmed from the top of the Eiffel Tower.

Forsythe, as if Merce Cunningham had never existed, claims to have discovered how to make movement by activating isolated body parts in unexpected relationships and sequences. When all 22 dancers are scramming around in the last act, they seem to be competing for our attention, ignoring one another. If two occasionally encounter each other, they don't create a partnership but rather elude each other's grasp, fail to accommodate, push each other's limbs into new positions that an instant later will be negated.

In part one, six dancers show us this distorted movement vocabulary, pushing hard at the inverted elbow and wrist joints, the scrunched-back shoulders and spastic torsos. At moments they poke into balletic elongations. The four women especially draw our attention to these conventional poses, as if reminding us that balletic bodies are there only to be visually devoured.

The heart of the ballet is a poetic, disjointed monologue about the female life force, the anima, source of nurturing, sensuality, passion, and regeneration. Forsythe doesn't mention Carl Jung as one of his authorities, but Dana Caspersen, the woman who speaks, embodies all these sex-specific attributes, which were exploited long ago, in a different way, by Martha Graham.

Caspersen first takes the voice of a spider, burrowing into the earth, merging with nature, surging with desire and menace. She's also identified with Persephone, the mythic bringer of spring to the earth, but I missed that part of her discourse. Bare-breasted and wearing a long filmy orange skirt with bustle to emphasize her underparts, she rages through a mysterious forest of slanted overhead cables and gnarls of equipment -- lighting instruments, TV monitors, microphones.

After a long time, another person appears, dressed the same way except with her breast covered. She moves in big sweeping spirals to a waltz rhythm, then suddenly wrenches out of shape and croaks the verse to "Luck Be a Lady Tonight." Without any further enlightenment, she's joined by 20 identical creatures, all waltzing in the ghostly, wired forest. I thought of Giselle and the other tarnished relics of romantic ballet that the Europeans can't completely eliminate from their history. The moonlit burying grounds where jilted girls, now possessed by vengeful spirits, dance in filmy white dresses to entrap male passers-by.

After this haunting image, the dance returns to chaos theory, and as the mobs are rushing around, striving, panting, freezing in strange, half-completed actions, the spider woman re-emerges. The dancers are running, competing; the trombones are blasting frantically; and the spider, now completely naked but lugging her cumbersome skirt behind her, squats and heaves and yells, demonically, triumphantly laying her eggs.